For businesses large and small, relying on a cloud-based collaboration and productivity suite such as Microsoft Office 365 is becoming the norm. Enhancing productivity in your organisation is vital to get ahead in 2017 - and using Office 365 can help, if it's used right...

FireEye warns 95 per cent of firms unable to defend against malware onslaught

Hackers target systems which are not easily patched, say researchers

Ninety five per cent of all enterprises are exposed to malware on a daily basis because the volume and sophistication of threats is outpacing their ability to counteract these risks, according to security firm FireEye.

The extent of the risk was highlighted in a new report by the firm, based on its analysis of incidents at its global customers which have evaded traditional defences.

The report also underlined the growing threat posed by the malware-as-a-service industry, where crooks hire out networks of infected computers.

“What's happening is a segregation of the malware market, where someone else will invest in infecting machines, and someone else will look to rent this for whatever means they see as most profitable,” James Todd, European technical head at FireEye told V3.

In the second half of 2011, so called pay per install malware was the fastest growing category of malware identified.

Furthermore, the proliferation of zero-day attacks, targeted at vulnerabilities for which there is no security patch, is exposing enterprise data to significant risk of being compromised, said Todd.

He added that typically, malware writers were targeting systems such as Javascript which operate on a multitude of enterprise devices, where IT has little chance of implementing version control or distribute patches in a timely manner.

The rise of PPI malware was noted by rival security firm Symantec in early 2011, which at the time said that nearly two-thirds of the malware it was seeing had been created by so-called toolkits, which provide ready-to-build malware assembly kits for crooks.